UPDATED** Q&A with the Naughty Dog Development Team: April Edition **

If you have some questions that you would like to ask Naughty Dog then here is your opportunity to ask them!

Up until about the 10th of April you will be able to post your questions regarding the Uncharted 3 multiplayer experience here in this thread. Usually 10 questions from this thread will be selected and answered by the Naughty Dog Development Team.

Once the replies are ready they will be posted in this thread for your perusal. What would you like to ask Naughty Dog this month?

If your reply contains more than one question or if you post multiple replies in a row then Naughty Dog may ignore your questions.

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1- Question: Can you please nerf hipfire and remove the whack and roll glitch in this game, isn't 140+ kudo's enough to make you realise that this really should happen, I know it's probably too late now because you ignored it for so long, so if the answer is no, can you please say that you will look into it for future Naughty Dog titles with competitive multiplayer?" - Matthijs_17

A: Due to game mechanics and animation – the whack and roll is a legitimate strategy that we accounted for when wrapping up game balance and MP development.As for hipfire, we appreciate you rallying support around this topic. It is something we will need some time to look at as it’s not a quick fix. To address anything with hipfire we’d need to tweak hipfire for every weapon in the game so proper balance occurs again. It will take some time and likely will be something we’ll have to look more closely at for future projects. However, it’s on the list of things we’d like to address time and resource permitting

2- Are there any chances of us ever getting that 3v3v3 3TDM Lab? It was supposed to happen months ago back in November, and it got replaced with a random Hammer Team Objective Lab, and it never showed up since. It was my (And quite a few others) most anticipated lab, and it would really suck if it never happened." – Orochidude

A: Unfortunately we didn’t know this until after we originally announced 3v3v3 3TDM Lab. Updating the scoreboard backend is not possible now.

3- "After Patch 1.15 the spawn points have been a little awry, will this ever be addressed in a patch? Village's spawn points are already bad enough especially when playing objective. You can spawn right next to both hill 1 & 3, but it also is very easy to spawn kill at Syria as well since you spawn in a wide open area. And I'm sure I'm not the only person who keeps spawning in front of that one guy trekking around the map. With a Sas." - Quizen8

A: We evaluate these on a case-by-case basis as they come up as problematic or not. If you can post up a video or direct message us some very specific footage of what the problem re-spawn points are and mention why they are issues then we can more readily address these.

4- "Would you guys consider altering Shade Survival treasure drop odds to be the same as Hunter Arena?" - IVIaster_ZED

A: We will be having rare treasure drop weekends that address these concerns from time to time. Also Shade Survival mode is a hardcore mode so it’s meant to be a good challenge.

5- Can you tweak the turn radius for sprinting to near the level of summer beta's? Along with some explanation for your response?" - B_Smiley

A: At this point we’d never want to revert back to our beta settings. It would mean undergoing a system wide rebalancing effort with all of the updates we’ve made so far. We can move only move forward based upon where the game stands now, and changing the turn spring turn radius is not something we have planned. We built Uncharted 3 MP to be a fast paced game. We’re happy with how the turning and movement is paced.

6- "Will you guys ever fix/address party splits?" – Sitrongr

A: These are cases that are difficult to reproduce in our testing environments, so we haven’t been able to reliably address all of the party splits you may have run into. What would help us is to continue to give us detailed step-by-step information on what was happening when the party gets split to address this specifically. This would be information like “I was in a party and I backed out to this menu to select a new loadout and the host went into this menu to change the color of his head item and then we split. Then I went and made a PB&J sandwich.” Very detailed and specific like that – we’ll continue looking into this with the information we’ve been gathering

7- "Are there any more patches in store for Uncharted 3? I'm guessing no.” – beat_da_beast

A: But you’re guessing! We’re really pushing the capabilities of the PS3 and the limits of our code for MP to the edge at this point, but we always want to try to see how far we can go. We plan to see what we can fix and what we might be able to be tweak yet time and resource permitting. We might, just maybe, even have something we cut added to the game if everything works out.

8- "Any plans for a "Best of The Lab" type of event as in you push out the best labs and lab maps into the lab game mode?" - tack129

A: Absolutely. We’ll continue to explore Labs as time matches along. To make something like this happen we’d need to potentially set up two polls. For instance, one for favorite Block Mesh Maps and one for favorite Game types in the Lab would have to happen. Then we can do best of labs. Let us get out our entire list of Block Mesh Maps first, cool? We’ll start rolling out more over the coming months.

9- "When you get the lab schedule organized (with the delay to Mid-May thing) can you update the calendar on the multiplayer portion of your site (HERE) with every lab event correctly (correct dates and if there is more than one game type (ie. more than one Block Mesh Map, or more than one mode variant))? It would be nice to know what we can expect to see in the coming weeks for the Lab playlist." - canadian94eh

A: We’ve updated this now. It’s meant to show what you can expect coming up and the date at which you can expect that Lab to be live.

A: Very uncommon for this to happen and this is something we’d need an exact reproduction case – step-by-step details - of how it happened to address in a meaningful way.

Bonus Question:

"If you had to pick a forum member to work for ND who would it be?" - munnsy1

A: It’s really tough to say without knowing what kind of development experience and work each member would be capable of. We give a pretty extensive and specific-to-a-discipline test prior to hiring everyone who works here. We expect our employees to perform at a very high caliber to make our games the best possible quality at all times. Open constructive criticism and heavy collaboration is very much encouraged here so we’d look for these attributes as well. Read our HR blog about how to get a job at ND!

Re: ** Q&A with the Naughty Dog Development Team: April Edition **

Q: Would you guys consider altering Shade Survival treasure drop odds to be the same as Hunter Arena?

For clarity's sake:

I'm not talking about the rate at which pickups drop from enemies, I'm talking about the odds of a particular treasure in any given set dropping. In Arena and Shade Survival, you usually see the first and middle treasures in any given set when a treasure is picked up, while the odds for the last treasure in a set to appear are terribly rare, to the point that Co-op treasure weekends are virtually useless to players seeking to earn the Collector and Hoarder trophies in these two modes.

In Hunter, that last treasure is MUCH more common; you probably get a final treasure somewhere around 30-40% of the time when something drops from an enemy before taking the effects of a treasure weekend into account. OTOH, many Co-op players dislike/hate that mode, and won't touch it for various reasons even though they know full well Hunter is practically their only hope.

If Shade Survival's drop odds are changed to be the same as Hunter's, many of these people would finally have a shot at those two trophies, particularly those who hate competing against other players to begin with. You guys would also potentially make more money off of it since Shade Survival is DLC. I don't see how this isn't a win/win since Hunter probably doesn't generate any revenue.

Re: ** Q&A with the Naughty Dog Development Team: April Edition **

In one of your replies you told the community that the ranks in the picture below were fake. Then how come that the 4th legacy badge wasn't fake? I mean the badge in the game looks EXACTLY like the one in this fan made picture.

I don't really care for more levels I just want to know.

(Saw it in another thread not that long ago, thought it was a good question)

Re: ** Q&A with the Naughty Dog Development Team: April Edition **

I agree with Zed, I spent a good amount of money on Shade Survival and was very dissapointed. I was at least hoping for rare or new treasure drops but this wasn't the case.

I also bought Fort, at least expecting new weapons or new treasures but also didn't happen.

At the very least you could give rarer treasure drops to people who spent the money on the co-op DLC. I mean I probably spent 30 minutes on Shade Survival trying to earn the trophy but realizing the mode was so bad I couldn't bare to play it and didn't want the trophy anymore.

Re: ** Q&A with the Naughty Dog Development Team: April Edition **

Are you happy with the game in it's current condition? I'm not being sarcastic, I'm just curious. If you're not, if you had more crew members working on the game, what would you change? What would be your biggest regret so far? (I'd like this to be counted as one question)

Last month you said there were more the two ND employees working on UC3, within the last five months, how many people have worked on this game? (If you can give names that would be good too)

Any hints as to what this gem is you said to have dug up? Is it a Map? Skin? Booster? Kickback? Gun? Mode? (Don't answer this if we already know the answer before this Q&A is over)

Is the money from UC3 DLC going into UC3, TLOU, a future project, or your own pockets? I thought the UC3 DLC would be getting better if the money was being invested back into the same game. Okay maybe this one is slightly sarcastic.